The Week In Pop: The Mis-MGMT Of Foster The People

Every few years, a musician achieves that rare combination of commercial dominance and critical acclaim — and therefore inspires lots of copycats — only to willfully retreat from the spotlight. This usually involves making an album designed to alienate mainstream audiences and/or distance the originator from the imitators. It also tends to create a vacuum into which those imitators can leap, allowing them to bask in commercial success for a while until everyone stops searching for “the new _____.” Nirvana and Pearl Jam attempted this maneuver in 1993 with the abrasive In Utero and the video-free Vs. respectively, clearing the way for Stone Temple Pilots, Live, and Bush to satiate the public’s bubblegrunge hunger. When Radiohead famously muffled Thom Yorke’s heavenly falsetto and handcuffed Jonny Greenwood’s spastic six-string theatrics on 2000′s Kid A, the world had no shortage of potential “new Radioheads” to choose from. And when constant hitmaker Kanye West flipped the digital middle finger that was Yeezus last year, urban radio programmers found workable substitutes in Yeezy facsimiles such as Big Sean and J. Cole.